George Santayana

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.